Contents

Overview[edit]

The Arab presence in Iran did not begin with the Islamic conquest of Persia in 633 AD. For centuries, Iranian rulers had maintained contacts with Arabs outside their borders, dealt with Arab subjects and client states in Iraq, and settled Arab tribesmen in various parts of the Iranian plateau. It follows that the "Arab" conquests and settlements were by no means the exclusive work of Arabs from the Hejaz and the tribesmen of inner Arabia. The Arab infiltration into Iran began before the Muslim conquests and continued as a result of the joint exertions of the civilized Arabs (ahl al-madar) as well as the desert Arabs (ahl al-wabar).[3]

According to the Minorities at Risk Project 2001, about 40% of Arabs are unskilled workers living in urban areas. The Arabs in the rural areas are primarily farmers and fishermen. The Arabs living along the Persian Gulf coastal plains are mostly pastoral nomads. Tribal loyalties are strong among rural Arabs, but also have an influence in urban areas. These have an impact on Arab socialisation and politicisation.[4]

Payame Noor University, which has 229 campuses throughout the country, in 2008 declared that Arabic will be the "second language" of the university, and that all its services will be offered in Arabic, concurrent with Persian.[5]

Although after the Arab invasion of Persia in the 7th century, many Arab tribes settled in different parts of Iran, it is the Arab tribes of Khuzestan that have retained their identity in language, culture, and Shia Islam to the present day. But ethno-linguistic characteristics of the region must be studied against the long and turbulent history of the province, with its own local language khuzi, which may have been of Elamite origin and which gradually disappeared in the early medieval period. The immigration of Arab tribes from outside the province was also a long-term process. There was a great influx of Arab-speaking immigrants into the province from the 16th to the 19th century, including the migration of the Banu Kaab and Banu Lam. There were attempts by the Iraqi regime during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88) to generate Arab nationalism in the area but without any palpable success.[7]

Genetics[edit]

Sampling NRY diversity, it was found that the Y-DNAhaplogroups F and J2 are carried at very high frequency among the Iranian Arabs - those two markers alone accounting for over half of Iranian Arab haplogroups.[8] This high ratio of haplogroup F, in particular, relates them, in a genetic sense, to peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and of the Barbary Coast, while an elevated frequency of haplogroup J-M172 is typical of Near Eastern peoples and reflective of the genetic legacy of early agriculturalists in, and their diffusion from, the Neolithic Near East c. 8000-4000 BCE.[9][10][11]Haplogroup R1a1, and R1, typical of Indo-Iranian groups, is also important, occurring in over 11% of the sample; haplogroup G is present in over 5%.[8]

From the immigrant Arab tribes of Khuzestan (from the present-day Iraq), the Banu Kaab at Dawraq (the later Fallāhīya and the present-day Shadegan) and the Mawlāʾī at Hoveyzeh can be mentioned.[12]

The well-known Bani Turuf tribe is settled in the Dasht e Azadegan (formerly Dasht-e Mīshān) around the town of Hūzagān (formerly Hoveyzeh), and consists of seven tribes, the Sovārī, Marzaā, Shorfa, Banī Sāleh, Marvān, Qāṭeʿ, and Sayyed Nemat. North of the lands of the ʿAnāfeja of the Āl Katīr, in the area called Mīānāb, between the Kārūn and Karkheh Rivers, dwell several Arab tribes, of which the best known are the Kaab (probably an offshoot of the Banī Kaʿb of southern Khuzestan), the ʿAbd al khānī, the Mazraa, the Al Bū Rāwīya, and the Sādāt. These tribes gradually immigrated into Iran during and after the early years of the Qajar period.[12]

Demographics[edit]

Elton Daniel in The History of Iran (Greenwood Press, 2001), states that the Arabs of Iran "are concentrated in the province of Khuzistan and number about half a million".[14] The Historical Dictionary of Iran puts the number at 1 million.[15] Iranian Arabs form 2% of Iran's population.[1]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

^Nikki R. Keddie, "Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution", New York University Press, 1995 (3/5/09). pp. 12–13: "Many writings state that the Arabs are Sunni, but the only bases for this assertion seem to be that most Arabs in the world are Sunni, that some Arabs in Khuzestan learly are Sunni, and the Shi’a Arabs follow some customs that Persians associate with Sunnism. In the absence of scholarly work or census surveys, it is impossible to estimate the percentages of Shi’as and Sunnis among the Arabs, but the evidence suggests that the great majority of Iranian Arabs are Shi’ite. First, the Arabs border on a part of Iraq that is, and has long been, almost entirely Shi’ite, and it would be surprising to find a Sunni pocket in such an area, especially since, second, they live in the Shi'ite state of Iran."

^R. Spencer Wells et al., "The Eurasian Heartland: A continental perspective on Y-chromosome diversity," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (August 28, 2001

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